Single-Cell Transcriptomic Analysis of Cardiac Progenitor Differentiation

Emerging single-cell RNA sequencing technologies hold great promises to boost our understanding of the heterogeneity and molecular regulation of diverse cell phenotypes during organ development. In this review, we aimed at summarizing recent advances in employing single-cell transcriptomic analysis to depict the landscape of embryonic heart development, in particular, focusing on cardiac progenitor (CP) differentiation.

Recent studies unbiasedly cataloged and characterized cardiac cell types in the spatial and temporal resolution during early heart development. Pseudo-time analysis revealed a temporal continuum of the differentiation progress from embryonic day (E) 6.5 to E9.5, implicating early cardiac lineage restriction during mouse gastrulation. First and second heart field (FHF and SHF) CPs adopted different differentiation strategies and underwent distinct transcriptional regulation. Collectively, the comprehensive molecular atlases yield a rich resource for identification of the key cardiac regulators and signaling molecules within the key cardiac gene regulatory network (GRN) governing cardiac cell fate determinations. This review offers insights into the exquisite process and its regulation of CP differentiation at single-cell resolution. As single-cell technologies continuously grow and evolve, computational integration of multimodal single-cell data with well-designed experimental validation promises to further delineate molecular basis in deploying cardiac progenitors of distinct sources with anatomical information.